Healthcare in the 21st century will need to become increasingly focused on wellness as a key strategy for dealing with the chronic diseases that account for 86% of healthcare costs in the US. To enable the precision health strategies of the future — what we call ’scientific wellness’ — it is necessary to generate large amounts of data on healthy people to quantify wellness states and to observe the earliest transitions to disease in order to enable predictive and preventive medicine. In this talk, I will discuss how such 'deep phenotyping’ data has been used in particular to study health effects of the microbiome, including: (1) to inform about how our gut microbiome and blood metabolites are related; (2) how the gut microbiome becomes more unique to each individual in healthy aging (3) insights from microbiome analysis and technical advancement through ongoing efforts at Thorne HealthTech.
